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Open Telemetry VS Apache SkyWalking

Compare Open Telemetry VS Apache SkyWalking and see what are their differences

Open Telemetry logo Open Telemetry

An observability framework for cloud-native software.

Apache SkyWalking logo Apache SkyWalking

Apache SkyWalking is an open-source application performance monitoring solution that provides tracking, metrics analysis, service mesh observability, alarm, and visualization.
  • Open Telemetry Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-27
  • Apache SkyWalking Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-21

Open Telemetry features and specs

  • Standardization
    OpenTelemetry provides a standardized set of APIs, libraries, and agents for collecting traces, metrics, and logs, helping to ensure consistency across different platforms and tools.
  • Vendor-neutrality
    OpenTelemetry is vendor-agnostic, allowing you to integrate with various backends, reducing lock-in with any specific monitoring solution.
  • Extensibility
    Its modular architecture allows developers to extend its functionalities easily, with support for custom instrumentation and exporters.
  • Community Support
    Being part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), OpenTelemetry benefits from a large, active community contributing to its development and providing support.
  • Ease of Integration
    Pre-built instrumentation libraries and SDKs for multiple languages simplify the process of integrating telemetry into your applications.

Possible disadvantages of Open Telemetry

  • Complexity
    The broad scope of OpenTelemetry, which includes tracing, metrics, and logging, can make it complex to understand and configure correctly.
  • Performance Overhead
    The process of collecting and exporting telemetry data can introduce performance overhead, which needs to be managed carefully.
  • Evolving Ecosystem
    As an emerging standard, aspects of OpenTelemetry are still under active development and can change, potentially leading to frequent updates and maintenance.
  • Learning Curve
    Engineers might face a steep learning curve when adopting OpenTelemetry due to its comprehensive nature and the need to understand various components and best practices.
  • Limited Maturity of Some Components
    Some of the libraries and features may not be fully mature yet, potentially leading to bugs or incomplete implementations in certain environments or languages.

Apache SkyWalking features and specs

  • Comprehensive Observability
    Apache SkyWalking provides end-to-end observability of distributed systems including service, process, and container metrics, as well as logs and events, enabling holistic monitoring and performance optimization.
  • Distributed Tracing
    SkyWalking offers robust distributed tracing capabilities that allow users to trace requests end-to-end across various services and platforms, aiding in root cause analysis and performance monitoring.
  • Open Source
    Being an open-source project under the Apache umbrella, SkyWalking benefits from community contributions, regular updates, and improvements, offering transparency and flexibility.
  • Wide Protocol Support
    SkyWalking supports a wide range of protocols and platforms, such as HTTP, gRPC, Dubbo, and supports multiple languages including Java, .NET, Python, and more, making it versatile across different tech stacks.
  • Dashboarding and Visualization
    The platform provides powerful dashboards and visualization tools, allowing users to easily interpret data, create custom dashboards, and derive insights from visual metrics.

Possible disadvantages of Apache SkyWalking

  • Complex Setup
    Setting up and configuring SkyWalking can be complex, especially for organizations unfamiliar with distributed observability tools, potentially requiring significant time and expertise.
  • Scalability Challenges
    While SkyWalking is designed for distributed systems, scaling its deployment for very large environments might present challenges, necessitating careful architectural planning.
  • Resource Intensive
    SkyWalking can be resource-intensive, as it collects a large amount of telemetry data, which might lead to high overhead on system resources like CPU and memory.
  • Learning Curve
    Due to its comprehensive feature set and various configurations, there can be a steep learning curve associated with effectively utilizing SkyWalking, particularly for new users.
  • Limited UI Customization
    The user interface, while functional, offers limited customization options compared to some commercial observability solutions, which might be a limitation for users needing highly tailored dashboards.

Open Telemetry videos

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Apache SkyWalking videos

Chapter04 Session10 - Apache Skywalking by Sheng Wu

More videos:

  • Review - Apache SkyWalking | Top 42 Alternatives of Apache SkyWalking
  • Review - Observability in Service Mesh Powered by Envoy and Apache SkyWalking - Sheng Wu & Lizan Zhou

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Open Telemetry and Apache SkyWalking)
Monitoring Tools
81 81%
19% 19
Performance Monitoring
85 85%
15% 15
Log Management
65 65%
35% 35
Development
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Open Telemetry seems to be a lot more popular than Apache SkyWalking. While we know about 186 links to Open Telemetry, we've tracked only 18 mentions of Apache SkyWalking. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Open Telemetry mentions (186)

  • Pomerium’s OpenTelemetry Tracing Support: Deeper Observability, Made Easy
    OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework that standardizes how applications collect, process, and export telemetry data such as metrics, traces, and logs. It’s the successor to OpenCensus and OpenTracing, and is now the de facto industry standard for modern observability. - Source: dev.to / 2 days ago
  • Monitoring & Observability: New Tools to Watch in 2025
    OpenTelemetry has moved from being “the future” to “the foundation.” In 2025, a new generation of tools is being built on top of OpenTelemetry, providing automated correlation between metrics, traces, and logs. - Source: dev.to / 5 days ago
  • Kubernetes and Container Portability: Navigating Multi-Cloud Flexibility
    OpenTelemetry – a collection of tools for exporting telemetry data. - Source: dev.to / 25 days ago
  • Building a declarative home lab using k3s, Ansible, Helm on NixOS and Rocky Linux
    The Prometheus + Grafana stack is a good introduction to observability, and I want to dive deeper into this topic by replacing Prometheus with OpenTelemetry sometime in the future. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Bottleneck Identification Using Distributed Tracing
    Getting Started: Use tools like Jaeger, Zipkin, or OpenTelemetry. Focus on critical paths, set smart sampling rules, and align trace data with system metrics. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
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Apache SkyWalking mentions (18)

  • I gave up on self-hosted Sentry
    A good APM tool I’ve been using for a few years is Apache Skywalking: https://skywalking.apache.org/ It might not do everything Sentry does but it definitely has helped with tracking down some issues, even production ones and runs in a fairly manageable setup (in comparison to how long even the Sentry self-hosted Docker Compose file is). What’s more, if you want, you can even use regular PostgreSQL as the backing... - Source: Hacker News / 16 days ago
  • OpenTelemetry Tracing in < 200 lines of code
    > I maintain that any platform that isn’t using some sort of tracing system is practically negligent in their engineering duty. For some, it's difficult because many of the self-hostable out there are rather complex and have high requirements, like https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/master/docker-compose.yml but it's not exactly ideal either. I wonder what other good options are out there, something... - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
  • 14 Monitoring Tools for Full-Stack Developers
    Apache SkyWalking is an open-source APM tool meant for distributed systems. It has support for distributed tracing, agents in multiple languages, and support for an eBPF agent. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Release Radar · May 2024 Edition: Major updates from the open source community
    Are you working on microservices, cloud native, and container-based architectures? Then you need to check out Apache Skywalking. It's an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) system, that provides monitoring, tracing, and diagnosing capabilities for distributed systems in Cloud Native architectures. This latest update has hundreds of changes including support for Java 21 runtime, new functions and parameters,... - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • Enhancing API Observability Series (Part 3): Tracing
    When choosing distributed tracing tools, considerations include your technology stack, business requirements, and monitoring complexity. Zipkin, SkyWalking, and OpenTelemetry are popular distributed tracing solutions, each with its unique features. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Open Telemetry and Apache SkyWalking, you can also consider the following products

SigNoz - Open source alternative to Datadog

Grafana - Data visualization & Monitoring with support for Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch and many more databases

Prometheus - An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.

Datadog - See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

Zipkin - Zipkin is a distributed tracing system. 

NewRelic - New Relic is a Software Analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics across millions of apps. We help the people who build modern software understand the stories their data is trying to tell them.